I. MEDITATION AND THE SEARCHING SPIRIT
II. LOCAL COLOR
III. PORTRAITS AND PERSONALITIES
Cities-James
E. Warren, Junior
Machines-Daniel Whitehead Hicky
On Seeing a Marble Building Cleansed-Anderson
M. Scruggs
First April in the City-Mildred Clark
To a Cosmopolite in Spring-Ernest Hartsock
On a City, Highway-Anderson M. Scruggs
Say This of Horses-Minnie Hite Moody
Lament Picaresque-Ernest Hartsock
Altar of Fire-Arthur Crew Inman
City Park in Summer-James Warren, Junior
City Park in Winter-James E. Warren, Junior
The Cinema-Thornwell Jacobs
Antaeus on Broadway-Glenn W. Rainey
City Dusk From an Airplane-Minnie Hite Moody
VI. NATURE
Strangely tonight have Babylon and Tyre
Surged back in ghosts of all their myriad years,
And Carthage clean as pearl and drunk with tears,
Atlantis brooding on the sea's desire.
The Trojan cymbals dimly bang and roar
With silver cough. And now the gleaming girls
Come back to stamp the stones. Faint frenzy swirls
Upon the night like Moloch come once more.
And I sit late upon my summer porch
Feeling my own young city's wistful breath,
Its glory and its lovers and its laughter.
But through the air the spectral cities march,
And I must dream how it, long years hereafter,
Like those imperial towns, will chant of death.
-JAMES E. WARREN, JUNIOR.
I hear them grinding, grinding, through the night,
The gaunt machines with arteries of fire,
Muscled with iron, boweled with smoldering light;
I watch them pulsing, swinging, climbing higher,-
Derrick on derrick, wheel on rhythmic wheel,
Swift band on whirring band, lever on lever,
Shouting their songs in raucous notes of steel,
Blinding a village with light, damming a river.
I hear them grinding, grinding, hour on hour,
Cleaving the night in twain, shattering the dark
With all the rasping torrents of their power,
Groaning and belching spark on crimson spark.
I cannot hear my voice above their cry
Shaking the earth and thundering to the sky.
Slowly the dawn comes up. No motors stir
The brightening hilltops as the sunrise flows
In yellow tides where daybreak's lavender
Clings to a waiting valley. No derrick throws
The sun into the heavens and no pulley
Unfolds the wildflowers thirsting for the day;
No wheel unravels ferns deep in a gulley;
No engine starts the brook upon its way.
The butterflies drift idly, wing to wing,
Knowing no measured rhythm they must follow,
No turbine drives the white clouds as they swing
Across the cool blue meadows of the swallow.
With all the feathered silence of a swan
They whirr and beat-the engines of the dawn.
-DANIEL WHITEHEAD HICKY.
ON SEEING A MARBLE BUILDING CLEANSED
The gale of steam against your walls
Brings back the glory time has hidden,
And now I see at intervals
Bright roses rise from stone, unbidden
By any urge of wind or weather;
Beneath the warm, fictitious rain
Petals and stems uncurl together
Out of their soil of stone and stain.
I see time-blackened cornices
Quicken again with leaf and fern
As fresh as spring, and by degrees,
The maidens on the arch return.
'The virgin whiteness of their dress
Billows in marble round their feet;
Like resurrected loveliness
They lighten all the dingy street.
When I am old, and silting time
Has laid its dust on every sense,
And like dim sculpture under grime,
Lies buried all life's recompense,
God grant some swift, transcendent hour,
Some new-found love, some dream re-blown,
To bring lost youth again to flower
Like roses waking out of stone.
-ANDERSON M. SCRUGGS.
Now as she shakes the blankets on the bed
She longs to race the wind on heifer trails
And swing her bare legs over pasture rails,
But she must clean the closet shelves instead.
Now that she knows azaleas are in bloom
A dusty hall is very hard to sweep.
A gnawing eats into her heart so deep
She nearly cries to leave the little room.
Mother has brought the kitchen curtains next
To wash and she (almost thirteen and small)
Trusting in older heads, although perplexed
Takes down the speckled basin from the wall
And tries to drown in the hot, stinging suds
The ache for violets and crabapple buds.
-MILDRED CLARK.
Leave daffodils and tulips in their corners
To preen in water-mirrors and look pretty;
Even forsythia shall find us scorners,
Weary of proper yards in this prim city.
Now come where poplars gossip in the rain
The scandal of the wild sweet early flowers,
Where lusty creeks like mares with leaping manes
Frighten the loudly silent April hours.
Here shall anemone maraud the senses,
Hepatica and bloodroot and azalea;
Wild peach beside deserted orchard fences,
And buttercups' belated Saturnalia.
Then spring will be no more a hackneyed story-
But ways turned golden and a walk in glory!
-ERNEST HARTSOCK.
ON A CITY HIGHWAY
On either side the winding asphalt road
The tawny fields flame out in gold and red,
And trees stand motionless beneath the load
Of peaceful hours. The highway that I tread
Teems with a thousand maddened motor cars
Cleaving the air with steel and whistling brass,
While on the hills the asters glow like stars,
And crickets sing of glory in the grass.
How piteously few the hours to learn
The beauty prisoned in a scarlet tree,
The patient wisdom of a flower or fern;
And yet, with never a pause to hear or see,
The cars, like monstrous beetles in the sun,
Go humming headlong towards oblivion.
-ANDERSON M. SCRUGGS.
SAY THIS OF HORSES
Across the ages they come thundering
On faithful hoofs, the horses man disowns.
Their velvet eyes are wide with wondering;
They whinny down the wind in silver tones
Vibrant with all the bugles of old wars;
Their nostrils quiver with the summer scent
Of grasses in deep fields lit by pale stars
Hung in a wide and silent firmament.
And in their hearts they keep the dreams of earth
Their patient plodding furrowed to the sun
Unnumbered springs before the engine's birth
Doomed them to sadness and oblivion.
Across the swift new day I watch them go
Driven by wheel and gear and dynamo.
Say this of horses: engines leave behind
No glorious legacy of waving manes
And wild proud hearts, and heels before the wind.
No heritage of ancient Arab strains
Blazes within a cylinder's cold spark;
An engine labors with a sullen fire,
Hoarding no dreams of acres sweet and dark:
No love for man has ever surged through wire!
Along the farthest slopes I hear the rumble
Of these last hoofs-tomorrow they will be still;
Then shall the strength of countless horses crumble
The staunchest rock and level the highest hill;
And man who made machines to gain an hour
Shall lose himself before their ruthless power.
-MINNIE HITE MOODY.
There was a day, the greenwood legend tells,
When bandits robbed with chivalrous caprice.
That day is gone. The modern brigand dwells
Feared and preserved by impotent police,
A spider of the city, spinning tricks
For scarfaced cutthroats. In his gory care
He guards immune the slayers by politics
And bribes with booty of the millionaire.
With bootleg gold he laughs at court assaults.
Snug in his armored limousine he rides,
A merchant prince of murder. No hand halts
The massacre of glamour. Now abides
No nut-brown villain brave as Robin Hood
Who made theft merry in a summer wood!
-ERNEST HARTSOCK.
The chimneys point to the smoky sky
And the red fires throb and glow
And the hot steel runs and the hammers crash
And a million sparks in birth-pangs fly;
And this I know,
Eh--eh-ho,
That sweating men and wheels that slash
And this deft hand of mine
In symphony combine,
In beauty and in power flow,
That America may grow.
What of the cogs and chains
That spin till naught remains
Save metal blunted and scarified,
Torn by the tide
The gods of machinery ride;
And what of you and what of me,
And what of the strength that all do see
We to fire, to speed,, to the shaping of things,
Make sacrifice while the gear-troll sings
And the shadow of making swoops on wings
Of dark and light
Through day, through night,
Across our youth, our manhood's might,
To leave, at the end, our age
As a daunted cast-off gage,
As the scrapped cog-wheels and levers bent,
To signify that all is spent?
The chimneys point to the smoky sky,
And sprockets wear, and men die,
And all that is passes, and is gone,
And new steel is forged, and new men are born,
And the heart of industry beats on
In epic beat
Like thudding feet;
And the red fires throb and glow,
And this I know,
Eh--eh-ho,
That sweating men and wheels that meet
And this deft hand of mine
In symphony combine,
In beauty and in power flow,
That America may grow!
-ARTHUR CREW INMAN.
Surely this spot was quitted by the gods
Long years ago and feels a solitude
In mortal men; surely this little wood
Has drunk Apollo's song; this fountain nods
Her misty form where nymphs with snowy arms
Splashed water into silver all the day;
And in these shadows Venus dreaming lay
Of fair Adonis and his absent charms.
Some day they shall return, these more than men,
Soft-treading, eager-faced, and wistfully,
Remembering each hill and fragrant glade
They used to love. Some day this lake again
Shall stir to reedy music and shall see
Great Pan come prancing through the purple shade.
-JAMES E. WARREN, JUNIOR.
A sullen calm has fallen like a death
Upon this spot about the lonely lake,
And little whirlwinds like the fitful breath
Of fevered sleepers in the midnight make
The leaden sky grow wrinkled as a witch
Across the surface of the waters where
Three ducks are gliding in a line. The rich
Ripe crack of frozen branches stirs the air
The hills glow dully with the silver frost
That chilly night has left upon their dress
Of brown and withered grass, nor have they lost
One feature of their sculptured loveliness.
But sparrows huddle in the bath-house eaves
And sadly chirp, remembering green leaves.
-JAMES E. WARREN, JUNIOR.
Upon the screen are thrown the flitting shades:
Kings, paupers, knaves in palaces and cells,
With interplay of seasons, passions, toils,
And cryptic plot of loves and heavens and hells.
Among the ghosts which shadowy form is I?
Who planned this play, made me his guest, and why?
-THORNWELL JACOBS.
I too had heard how laden galleons bring
The tribute of the nations to your throne,
And how in spires of regimented stone
A breathless horde of little workers fling
Your arms aloft. They said you could not spare
The very skies their grandeur, through the bars
Of space you caught a handful of the stars,
And tangled up the heavens in your hair.
I came a pilgrim in the mingled stream
To touch the garment of your queenlihood,
And learned only how pallid life can seem
That breaks its ordained bondage to the good
Earth, and that barters off the ancient sun
For these dim pin-pricks at oblivion.
-GLENN W. RAINEY.
Buildings and spires dissolve themselves to be
Strange magic of a new geometry,
While corner lamps dance gaily, spark on spark,
Ten thousand glow-worms welcoming the dark.
A wisp of smoke hangs loosely as a shroud;
A searchlight's finger strokes a sleepy cloud.
Chimneys and roofs are phantoms born with angles;
Electric signs are fairies dressed in spangles.
Far to the south a furnace lifts a flare
Of orange fire to stab the purple air.
Along the evening's rim skyscrapers stand
Like lonely giants waiting hand in hand.
A river coils, mysterious and black,
Like some queer snake with barges on its back,
And common shapes, before this wizardry,
Define the edges of infinity.
Day is lost utterly; the shadows fill,
Steeples are vanished, towers fade until
Skylights can be no longer what they are,
But mirrors held to catch a falling star.
-MINNIE HITE MOODY.